Louidgi Beltrame’s El Brujo (2016) and Liv Schulman’s The New Inflation (2022) question the transformative agency of cinema, asking whether the medium can transfer energy across different borders. In both works, cinema becomes a device through which disparate realities are brought into contact. What is transferred in this encounter remains often elusive: a gesture, a rhythm, a memory, a form of speech, or perhaps simply the possibility of one situation being activated by another.

Jean-Pierre Léaud entered cinema at the age of fourteen in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959). His particular mode of acting—called an “anti-natural” stance by Truffaut—moves along an unpredictable, whimsical line between mild madness and depression, sorrow and laughter, retaining an almost eternal youthful quality despite the gradual transformation of his body. His small but characteristic gestures— the raised index finger, the hand in his hair—seem already performative, as if each appearance contained a kind of film within the film. Through roles with Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Eustache, Pasolini, Assayas, and Kaurismäki, Léaud became not only an actor but a cinematic figure, carrying the memory of the New Wave from one film to another.

It is precisely this figure that Beltrame managed to convince to take part in his constructed circuit of transmission. El Brujo, meaning “the sorcerer” in Spanish, takes its name from its location, one of the most important archaeological sites on the Peruvian coast, a place traversed by a long succession of civilizations before the arrival of the Spanish. It is there that the Peruvian healer José Levis Picón Saguma re-enacts the final sequence of The 400 Blows, in which the young Antoine Doinel, played by Léaud, escapes to the shore. The shaman assumes the place left vacant in the cinematic scheme by the ailing actor, who has remained in France. Following a mesa, a healing ceremony involving the psychoactive San Pedro cactus, Picón Saguma takes over a trajectory that cinema has already inscribed into collective memory.

The gesture is then returned to Léaud. Filmed in the streets of Paris, now an older man, he follows a track that superimposes memories of the filming of The 400 Blows with his subjective history of the Parisian district where he lives. His otherwise mundane walk is marked by small, recognizable gestures and movements that recall his acting style, turning an ordinary activity into a subtly performative act. The shaman’s stride, Antoine Doinel’s flight, and Léaud’s later walk become connected trajectories. The geometric lines of the Peruvian landscape—its excavations and monumental remains—are matched by the structure of the filmic montage, composed of travelling and panoramic shots and accompanied by the modular, synthetic music of Jacno’s “Triangle” (1979).

Beltrame orchestrates a series of displacements; characters, motifs, gestures, and eras migrate from one context to another. Yet the film places particular emphasis on the energy that might be transferred through these displacements. A gesture performed by one body decades earlier can be taken up by another body on another continent, while the memory of the original gesture continues to exert its force on the body of the person who first performed it.

In this sense, El Brujo also invokes an older conception of cinema itself. As film theorist Rachel Moore has shown, there is a strong tradition of understanding cinema as a medium capable of restoring a latent potential for wonder, reviving animistic sensibilities, healing some of the traumas produced by the empirical transformations of modernity, and providing access to ecstatic or hallucinatory visions.

A different form of transfer takes place in Liv Schulman’s The New Inflation. Shot in Omaha, Nebraska, with non-professional actors, the 63-minute video draws on Schulman’s experience of Argentine inflation as both an economic and emotional phenomenon. “Inflation is our national madness,” Schulman has described it, an experience that governs everyday life while remaining inseparable from Argentina’s turbulent economic relationship with the United States. Rather than treating inflation as a problem to be explained through economic rationality, Schulman approaches it as a collective narrative, a system of thought with its own temporalities, fears, and fantasies about the past and future.

The film adopts subversive theatrical traditions associated with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, producing a form of estrangement through unexpected shifts, circular logic, and language that repeatedly slips into the familiar but nonsensical. Its characters speak through an accumulation of economic and political jargon that seems at once authoritative and fundamentally unstable. Language begins to resemble a market in which meaning is continually exchanged, inflated, and devalued. The use of non-professional actors draws attention to the personalities the performers bring to the film, allowing their speech and gestures to retain a degree of ambiguity.

This linguistic excess recalls the manifesto-like dialogues of New Wave cinema, but Schulman pushes the mechanism towards something more pathological. The film’s language operates almost like a psychotic system; it establishes connections, causalities, and values that are internally compelling while remaining externally impossible to stabilize. The costumes and settings reinforce this constructed logic. The performers wear costumes resembling police or security uniforms, disrupted by cut-out sections, circular holes, and various prosthetic additions. In this sense, Schulman demonstrates how economy becomes a fiction—not because economic consequences are unreal, but because the systems through which they are organized depend upon collective acts of belief, repetition, and representation.

The two works approach cinema as a technology of displacement. Neither of the two films transfer is transparent. Something is inevitably altered in the movement between contexts, and it is precisely this alteration that makes the transfer possible.

Both films suggest that cinema’s transformative agency does not necessarily consist in overcoming distance or producing understanding. It may instead lie in its capacity to make things circulate— to detach gestures, images, voices, and forms of thought from their origins and set them into motion elsewhere. But whether such movement constitutes transmission, transformation, contamination, or merely the repetition of a circuit that has already consumed itself remains open.